Orlando Whitfield started his career as a dealer in the feverish global art market but left it disillusioned and burnt-out a decade later. Today he works as a writer and his recent book is All That Glitters, a memoir that explores his experience as an associate of Inigo Philbrick, an ambitious art market player who in 2022 was sentenced to seven years in prison for defrauding investors in what has been described as allegedly the biggest art fraud in American history. Whitfield, by contrast, ended up in rehab and embarked on a period of painful self-reflection. All that Glitters reads like a script for a thrilling heist movie, which, indeed, it is likely to become since HBO has recently acquired the rights. Joining Whitfield in conversation for this episode is Kathryn Hughes, a literary critic at the Guardian and Professor at the University of East Anglia. Her latest book, Catland, concerns the Edwardian artist Louis Wain whose popular illustrations changed the way that the modern world thinks about cats.

(Image of Orlando Whitfield courtesy of Robin Christian.)